Infection of the uterus, or pyometra, is a relatively common condition that can affect unspayed cats, and it can be deadly if left untreated. Learn how to prevent and recognize this disease condition. READ MORE

What is the best food for a pet rabbit - fresh or packaged? Should you feed a baby rabbit different food than you would an adult rabbit? And what should you avoid feeding? Get the answers here. READ MORE

A U.K. based study found a whopping 560% rise in Lyme disease in the last six years, and a U.S. study published earlier this year shows a 320% increase since the 1990s in tick populations that carry the disease. Why is this happening?READ MORE

Facebook did some research to get to the bottom of the social characteristics of both cat lovers and dog devotees. What they found out may surprise some who thought the stereotypes were true. READ MORE

Ever wonder which are the most popular puppy and kitten names? Whether your pet is a boy or a girl, you'll find the perfect name on our list - a list of over 5,000 puppy and kitten names! Use the drop-down to change from puppy to kitten.READ MORE

petMD Blogs

The Daily Vet is a blog featuring veterinarians from all walks of life. Every week they will tackle entertaining, interesting, and sometimes difficult topics in the world of animal medicine – all in the hopes that their unique insights and personal experiences will help you to understand your pets.

You know, it really shouldn’t bother me what others say ... except that it does. When Gaston wears his screaming Christmas plaid, or Vincent his iridescent purple, people always seem to comment:

"Wow! Doesn’t he look the peacock!"

"Liberace has nothing on him!"

"Interesting color for a boy. Are you sure he knows what he’s wearing?"

Or, too often, less thoughtfully, and unfortunately more commonly:

"That’s a totally gay outfit he’s got on!"

Yes, the holiday season and its inevitable onslaught of random humanity means my dogs (and their outfits) are subject to more scrutiny than I would’ve expected. And so it is that their sartorially-manifested high holiday spirits are less than celebrated due to their "gay-ness."

Such inevitable outbursts invariably get me to thinking: Why the heck do people have to project their own sexual politics onto our blameless dogs? And why should our dogs suffer the slings and arrows of our misplaced anthropomorphism?

These reflections reminded me of a post I penned almost a year ago on the subject of pets and their sexual identity. After this past weekend’s totally annoying talk on the subject of my dogs’ fashion sense, I just had to reprise its emphatic message:

Believe it or not, I’m often asked to render my "expert" opinion on this subject. I have no idea what makes me an authority on this in the minds of some of my clients but — no matter — I try to take this line of questioning in stride.

Funny enough, my gay clients are the ones most likely to comment or query on the subject and I guess that makes sense; it’s not as if they consider the subject taboo or in any way off limits. Yet I’m still never sure what to say when I’m asked if a pet is gay.

'I don’t know, ' (said with a smile and an amused gleam in my eye) is my best reply. I mean, how am I supposed to know? I’m sure it’s possible, but does it really matter? Is it a medical concern? It’s only an issue if said animal chooses not to mount their selected mate, in which case it still doesn’t really matter; I can just collect male semen by hand and artificially inseminate the female. Done. No gay or straight issue there.

The bottom line? I spend so much of my life trying to convince people to spay and neuter their pets that to venture into the realm of sexual orientation seems like an unreasonable and unnecessary leap into a fruitless and potentially harrowing oblivion.

OK, sure, pets engage in all kind of sexually evocative behavior with members of the same sex (i.e., humping). Then again, they’re also willing to hump their friends’ heads, the household cat, stuffed hedgehogs, and their parents’ legs. Does this make them gay, perverse or deviant? No!

And I would like to quickly point out here that I am NOT equating "gay" to "perverse" or "deviant." I am simply offering the latter two as separate and distinct alternatives. (So perhaps now you see why I am so reluctant to engage in conversation on this subject? It’s fraught with a plethora of misunderstandings and political pitfalls.)

But as I asked before: What does it matter? And who cares anyway? Spay and neuter your dog (or don’t — but only if you have a well-informed reason not to) and get over the issue of his or her sexuality. You’ll never fathom the mind of a dog anyway.

Unless you plan on breeding your dog, his or her sexual psychology should be entirely irrelevant. And even so, as I explained, it’s still a non-issue.

One final, emphatic point: There’s something disrespectfully anthropomorphic about how we humanize our dogs’ sexual and pseudo-sexual behavior. More specifically, it seems altogether wrong to apply our own convoluted and divisive sexual politics to animals, whether we’re talking about house pets or farm animals.

Which brings me to what really bothers me when people say my dogs look "gay" in their lively new Dublin Dog Christmas collars. Any imagined injury to my own dogs’ egoes be damned. What bugs me is that even as don’t-ask-don’t-tell is in its final demise, you’d think people would be less wont to use terms of homosexuality as insults.